The struggles of creating can be very hard to feel, even harder to pinpoint and close to impossible to articulate. It’s a loneliness driven by a dread of failure. It’s a search for significance with an unknown outcome. It’s the most expensive purchase of the least known product. It’s restrained elevation, ecstasy infused with a fear of falling. Dizzying opportunity and nauseating freedom. It’s hope that we have significance and a longing to belong.
Category: existential
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What to want
Odd that it can be such a challenge to know what I want.
By definition shouldn’t that be all I know, the primal
human driver. Conversely, what we desire now is not what
we want for ourselves. Food, drink, pasta, alcohol,
cars, games, recognition, admiration, sex, sports, money, travel,
victory, none of these provides any lasting fulfillment.
Is it the journey to these things? Or maybe the exact
opposite, the journey towards no things?Sitting here now what do I want the most? Freedom? If
I could choose I would not be exactly here tomorrow,
seems to me to be a lack of freedom. But that’s not true
because I can choose and I am here. That’s an institutional
barrier. I need money and approval and assurance.I would go to London to set up my bike and ride it far. I
would drink coffee and read. I would continue to learn
to program because I believe it can be the key to a door
that I haven’t uncovered. I would build something from
my own imagination and drive.Sometimes we’re so busy thinking about what we have to do
that we forget to think about what we want. Really want.Approval, admiration, praise. That’s what my being hungers for
but not what my rational mind wants. The question is how do
I make that conversion. Maybe the being is the primitive
instinct and the mind the rational rebel. The distance between
them is resistance.
Oscar Holm 